Gervase Gallant muses on how the process of writing code could be as natural as the process of writing prose. I like this piece.

Rafe points out a growing chorus is critquing Struts.

Marc Fleury, creator of JBoss, posts a self serving, but very insightful Why I Love EJBs. It is a must read for server side Java developers.

Dave Winer hasn’t smoked for six months! Congratulations!

Borland being bought by Microsoft is just…. ironic! Wonder if it will happen?

Mike posts about the desktop software market and wonders is it dying?. I’d have to answer no. What has died (settled down more like it) is the productivity software market. That market was the area of so much interest/competition/innovation during the 80s and early 90s.

During the mid to late 90s software development turned it’s attention to the internet. A grand switch of attention occured on the server side. The desktop stagnated.

Now that attention is turning itself back to the desktop looking to utilize the lessons learned and the bridges built to exploit the benefits of connectivity, sharing, communication, integration, and convenience.

New ways of organizing the complexity out of the desktop/internet experience are are coming on the scene almost daily. Napster? Kazaa? Maybe an RSS Aggregator? Radio or AmphetaDesk perhaps? Google on the desktop will happen. Believe it. Weblogging as a metaphor for organizing your desktop? Yep. That too. Think of categorization and date/time instead of folder/office cabinet. Check out the Microsoft MyLifeBits Project. These are the kind of desktop innovations that could only occur after attention was spent on the Internet.

I’d argue that iPhoto heralds a new kind of app. It’s more then a simple photo manager. It integrates a multimedia external device to your PC. It enables you easily share your efforts. That’s a new class of software that won’t settle down for a long time. Think iPod, cellphone and PDA. How will these ultimately impact your desktop is unforseen right now. But they will.

One long running behind the scenes market not dominated is developer tools. It’s still wide open. But if MS buys Borland…. man oh man…. that would be interesting. I wonder if that will do for IDEs what it did when they purchased FoxPro and took over the desktop database market?

Speaking of bridges Shelley is building them at her weblog lately.

This O’Reilly article does the best job I’ve seen so far at getting you started with Eclipse.

Shelley posts on the irony of a summit on Social Software that has as attendies mostly “made up almost exclusively of white, educated, upper-middle or upper class, 30-50 year old males.”

Dave Rogers posts in her comments a “truth” I believe in computing – “I think history shows that technology has never changed _what_ people do, it only changes the _how_. Technology usually compresses processes in time, or expands them in space, often both at the same time. Most of the time we confuse the “how” with the “what,” and think something novel has happened.”

That last phrase though is a little off. It *is* novel when the time is shorted to accomplish a task, or distances are compressed, or messages further distributed. The “How” is important 🙂 But the essential truth he points to here I know to be very true.

“We’re really [screwing] up on the client side,” Gosling wrote to Richard Green, Sun’s vice president of developer tools, in an e-mail dated May 13, 2002, “mostly through neglect.”

Read the rest at CRN. Ouch, the truth hurts. via GMSV.

I’m having fun reading this free online book on the art of computer programming. As Mike says – this isn’t your typical comp-sci book.

Todd Cranston-Cuebas, Senior Technical Recruiter for Ticketmaster, shares some tips in this interview. via this Slashdot thread.

It’s for C development, but can mostly apply to Java as well. Good to see similarities to my own approach in there.